Kurtz Gets Award for Giant Flub

There are awards you want to pin up on your refrigerator. Then there are those best swept under the rug. This is one of those.

In the November issue of Washingtonian, Harry Jaffe takes his machete to Newsweek/The Daily Beast‘s Washington Bureau Chief Howard Kurtz for the idiotic episode in which he quotes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) dinging President Obama‘s message operation. He was working off notes from another reporter and apparently his eyeballs fell out during the transcribing process. Jaffe, who called it the “2011’s most embarrassing correction” was determined to give Kurtz the award – if he didn’t earn it for getting the Speaker’s quote disastrously wrong, he was going to get it for not knowing he was talking to that scoundrel (we use this word semi-affectionately) Kurt Bardella as opposed to Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). How Kurtz could have confused Bardella’s twentysomething voice for Issa’s is still a mystery of JonBenet Ramsey proportions. Unless…was Bardella imitating the Viper car alarm voice once used by his boss? Even then, alarm bells should have erupted in Kurtz’s head.